Kiss or Kill

Amazing, australian, creeping and gripping! These are the adjectives that suit to this movie. It is a masterpiece about trust. How much do you trust your partner? That is the issue! and everything becomes more complicated if you are also psychotic like the protagonists of the movie. In fact nikky is an almost mad and disturbed girl, grown up with a terrible memory: her mother's murder; now she is a thief who robs the victims with her partner Al : a wealthy, strange guy. One night while they are robbing a rich manager in Sidney,something goes wrong: after he has been drugged, he dies and besides they find a videotape who showed the unusual sexual enjoyments of a very famous rugby ex-champion. So, Nikky and Al decide to flee to Perth(on the other shore of Australia) and are chased by the police and Zipper Doyle(the rugby ex-player) who wants to recover his video. During the journey trough Australia, they are involved in some strange deaths and they start to be suspicious of each other;but something is happening and nobody is understanding it ! Among huge australian landscapes, motels owners, sage aborigines, mysterious "carsleepers", odd desert stories, kangoo meat, Al and Nikky are going to find themselves and to figure their relationship out. Frances O' Connor is resounding and the editing incredible; the story is gonna grip you by its frenetic rhythm. A Must!

The attention-grabbing beginning of this movie finds two scam artists, having accidentally killed a victim, stumbling on the possibility of blackmailing a football star, and setting in motion a quirky road movie with hints of black humour.

I have to say, this sketchy synopsis recalls the type of plotline the Coen brothers might use. This is slightly misleading - the film is darker, less gimmicky and ultimately less fun than standard Coen brothers fare - but nonetheless the film does share several of the brothers' failings - noticeably an inability to create a consistent tone or convincing psychologies for the lead characters. We know the most important character suffered severe trauma as a child, yet we learn little about her other than that, and her boyfriend seems an even bigger mystery.

Also, to illustrate the problems the film has with tone, the film has noirish themes, but has incongruously bright sunny photography. It also contains one brilliantly funny sequence, in which a cop finds he knows his partner less well than he thought, but frankly this scene looks like it comes from another movie.

However, the film is always watchable. It does look attractive, even if its main stylistic tic - continual jump cuts, presumably in homage to Godard - does jar after a while. Moreover, a brash, confident central performance from Frances O'Connor definitely holds the attention, and I did feel that I cared for her basically hard-to-like character.

Although the film is only a partial success, it still looks like the type of film that could develop a cult following.

This is a sort of modern day film noir directed by Bill Bennett and stars Matt Day and Frances O'Connor. Day and O'Connor play a young couple in Austrila who are a couple of con artists and they mostly scam married men who pick up O'Connor in a bar. Things are going good until someone actually dies and they wind up with a videotape, on that videotape is a celebrity named Zipper Doyle, who is a football star, and he's having sex with a young boy. Day and O'Connor go on the run with both the police looking for them and Doyle trying to kill them. There are several more deaths but you don't see who murders who and Day and O'Connor get to the point where they can't trust each other. It's a pretty good movie that was a huge hit in Austrilia.

I thoroughly enjoyed Kiss or Kill. I thought it was well acted, stylistically shot and terribly romantic! I recommend this film for couples that want to make it a Blockbuster night. Written and directed by Bill Bennett, this movie is about two cons who accidentally end up on the wrong side of the law and on the lam. Frances O'Connor absolutely sizzles stealing almost every scene. Matt Day holds his own as her tough as nails boyfriend with the big heart. Kiss or Kill's supporting cast charms as well with each character introduced breathing new life, meaning and comedy to the movie. I didn't think there was one bad performance in it. Kiss or Kill was witty, clever and, in some scenes laugh out loud funny. Kiss or Kill get's my seal of approval. Bust out the popcorn!

Any film that is prefaced with an extract from a Dylan Thomas poem deserves some praise and this film doesn't disappoint in most departments. This is essentially a film for students of film because it plays with so many cinematic conventions and mixes seemingly irreconcilable genres. Kiss or Kill is both film noir and a road movie, playing both genres against each other with the aid of Godardian jump-cuts to heighten the uneasiness and underlying menace the film evokes so well. In this sense, the film is visually audacious and technically brilliant and that's thanks to the direction which is on-target most of the time. My only gripe was the inclusion of some dubious story lines that detracted from the film's overall uneasy effect. Thankfully the acting of both leads compensates such flaws. Worth watching with a Film Theory book in one hand and popcorn in the other.